Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Andrew McCarthy has some comments on the Obama
administration’s policy toward Egypt. We have discussed this topic before, but McCarthy’s
view is cogent and detailed. Thus, worthy of attention.

In his words:

How
does Egypt differ from Saudi Arabia and Qatar? Two ways: (1) It was not invited
to join President Obama’s ballyhooed “coalition”
of Arab Muslim states fighting against ISIS, and (2) it is actually fighting
against ISIS.

Obama,
of course, has aligned himself with the anti-American, anti-Western and
anti-Semitic Muslim Brotherhood, which, like ISIS, wants to impose sharia
globally. Thus the State Department continues to host and
consult with the Brotherhood about the future of Egypt, even though the
Brotherhood has been outlawed as a terrorist organization – the government it
dominated having been ousted from power after millions of Egyptians took to the
streets to demand its removal.

Meanwhile, the new government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who was
elected by a wide margin after the Brotherhood was cashiered, is taking the
fight to ISIS – including cooperating with Israel in the Sinai, where ISIS is
working with Hamas (the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch), as Caroline Glick
detailed last week, here.

Moreover,
the New York Times reports that
Egypt is conducting airstrikes against ISIS’s new operations base in Libya (the
country that Islamists have destabilized and largely overrun thanks to
President Obama’s decision to help Islamists overthrow the Qaddafi regime).
Unlike the former Brotherhood government that freed jihadist leaders and abetted
the persecution of Coptic Christians, Sisi’s government is attacking the
jihadists to avenge ISIS’s savage murder of Egyptian Christians.

Either the Obama administration policy is chaos or the
administration has taken the wrong side in the conflict:

So here we have what American officials have always said we’ve desperately
needed: A respected Muslim leader of a vitally important Muslim country who is
courageously opposing – in word and deed – the jihadists and their ideology.
And what is the president of the United States doing? He is denying them
the support they need and driving them
into the arms of Vladimir Putin.

Besides
remaining miffed that Egypt has outlawed the Brotherhood, Obama is busy helping
Iran become a nuclear power – even as Iran-backed terrorists seize Yemen and
target Israel. So Russia has moved in, pledging to aid economically strapped
Cairo in both fighting terrorists and building a nuclear power industry.

Regional actors who are studying the Obama policy are less likely to say that he doesn't know what he's doing than to think that he has taken sides.